The locks scrape. The sound is an alarm clock for the sleeping beasts. Sleep falls from them in ragged sheets. Enough of their stuffing is still human that they wake in a fog, clawing at their eyes, trying to figure why they woke prematurely. Who knows if they’ve conquered caffeine addiction yet?
“Lisa?” I scan the barn, search the seams for a way up. “How did you get up there?” But then I spot the heap of rotting sticks on the ground. Leftover ladder parts.
Being quiet won’t save us now—only being fast.
“Lisa, you’re going to have to jump.”
Her head and body shake with the idea.
A slit appears between the door and jam. The Swiss stares at me, eyes devoid of warmth. “
I risk it all in one harsh breath. “Lisa!”
Her head jerks up. Her mind engages long enough to understand my demand. I snap my fingers, give her an aural goal.
Three sets of eyes swivel toward me. Two more don’t. The largest male, a man maybe forty years old before White Horse, pins one of the females to the floor facedown, mounts her like a four-legged creature. She squirms beneath him, but only until he bangs her face on the shit-crusted planks. The others crawl towards me, their backs hunched and tense. The sixth villager staggers to her feet. She spasms like a puppet tied to strings, then her joints seem to melt and her bones no longer hold her upright.
White Horse kills a hostage. The once-woman’s body seizes, flinging straw with dying fingers. For a moment, the scene reminds me of macaroni art. A second woman scrambles to her side. She pulls the other close, smoothes the snarled hair with a ruined hand, cradles her until Death rides away with his prize.
“Now!”
For a moment Lisa hangs in the balance, until gravity tucks a finger in her shirt pocket and pulls. Then she’s falling like a pretty pebble.
I collapse under the weight of her, but refuse to stay down. My will to survive is our trebuchet. I shove her ahead of me, squeeze her through the door’s gap into the light, thrust myself into what’s left of the space.
It’s the still-human sobbing that jerks me still. The world is filled with tears; these should be drips in an overflowing bucket. I should be immune. But I still have a heart, and it rushes to sympathize.
I taste their grief when I bite down on my lip. It’s salt with a hint of winter.
The Swiss snatches a fistful of my shirt, drags me backwards.
“Don’t be a fool,” he says. He locks the doors in silence, although the silence is only his. There’s Lisa’s crying. Then there’s me.
“They’re still people.”
“They’re an abomination,” he says. “Unnaturally selected because of a disease we made.”
I don’t ask how he knows about the disease’s origins or how much. Not now. Later, maybe. Right now I want to check on Lisa and get us moving again.
We go as far as the tree where I left my backpack, she and I. Pink rivers take the southern course down her youthful skin, more rain than blood. Her chin is awash with strawberry fluids. The cuts on her head don’t appear to be serious, although there is no way of knowing how deep the damage goes. Could be she’s a time bomb, the seconds ticking away until the pressure inside her skull squeezes the delicate pink hemispheres and…
“Hurry,” the Swiss says. He’s sneaked up on us. “The doors are locked, but they might find another way.” He nods at Lisa. “She will recover.”
“What are you, a doctor?”
“Yes.” Equally blunt. He grabs her chin, tilts it up. “As I said, she will be fine.”
“Are you okay?” I ask.
Lisa’s nod blurs into a shake.
“How did they get you?”
Another shake.
“Her eye is gone.” He shoves up her eyelid, revealing a bleeding hole where there used to be a whitish orb with a pretty gray-green center. “Perhaps they popped it out like a grape. The soft bits are a delicacy.”
“Lisa, baby girl, how did it happen?”
She lifts her head from the Swiss’s hands. In her lap, her fingers curl like dying leaves. They’re wet with tears. “I don’t know,” she murmurs. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Beneath the worn cotton, her shoulders tremble.
The Swiss isn’t done speculating. “The stupid child did this to herself.”
I stand, pull on my backpack, help Lisa to her feet. I need to get her fed and cleaned, then get her away from here before the once-humans find that way out.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I ask him.
“She’s blind.”
“She always was.”
“And yet, she wanders out here unsupervised. She’s a fool and a liability. You should not trust anyone,” he says. “Not even her.”
“Shut up,” I say. “Just shut up.” But he’s planted a seed and now the vines of it are creeping through my mind.
“Have you looked inside the jar yet, Zoe?”
“No. I know I have to.”
Dr. Rose’s voice gives me confidence. He washes me in calm.
“If you’re going to move past this, you have to look inside.”
“I know.”
“I know that you know.” Our smiles meet and touch in the center of the room, the way our bodies never will.
By the time I reach my apartment my mettle has melted, leaving only fear.
“He’s going to blow up the barn,” I tell Lisa. “I can’t stop him.”
The bicycle is heavy with food again, all of it canned, from the village’s pantries. I found bandages and antibiotic cream that she now keeps in the waterproof pocket of her rain jacket.
We stand on the road we crossed just yesterday, the world still and damp around us. Then it explodes and fire fills the sky. We don’t fall to the ground this time. We stand and watch and I am not glad the barn is no more. All I can do now is hope those people found a sort of peace.
“I thought I was going to upchuck again,” Lisa says as we watch that piece of our past burn. Her voice is pale and numb. “I heard the rain stop, so I went out for fresh air. I got lost, couldn’t find the window to climb back in. I heard them coming. Making noises like dogs, they were. I didn’t know they weren’t dogs. Not at first. Not until I woke up in the barn. I was trying to get out when I found a ladder, so I climbed it.”
“What happened to your eye?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“You’ll think I’m stupid. A stupid blind girl.”
“A stupid person wouldn’t have climbed that ladder.”
For a moment she fades away. Shock is still lingering around her edges.
“It wasn’t the dog people. There was something sharp in the wood. A nail, maybe. A big, fat nail. See? I’m so stupid. No one will love me now. Not with one eye.”
An invisible line scratched in the ground between us stops me from crossing the breach. And I’m all out of useful words.
“I was supposed to get a Guide dog, before all this. I always wanted a dog. Dogs love you no matter what.”
